We know the importance of deploying a robust backup strategy and we know the benefits it can bring to your business. This isn’t to say there are no backup challenges. Like with any technology, it can be expensive or become quickly outdated.
In this blog, we look at the top 5 backup challenges affecting businesses today and how you can overcome them.
Reliability
If you are relying on an older physical backup system you need to be aware that tapes or hard drives can degrade or even fail as they get older. Not to mention the possibility of accidentally damaging or losing these important digital business records. If you are currently relying on this method then you should be copying your backups or ensuring they are stored in more than one location, though this can prove to be another challenge for IT.
Data growth
As your business grows, the amount of data your business creates grows (a lot). Many businesses are not fully aware of just how much data they are gathering, where this data is coming from or where it is stored. This comes from the nature of a modern business and the fact that our networks are no longer confined to our physical offices but exist in extended networks out with the safety of your firewall, including mobile networks, cloud and third-party suppliers. If you don’t know how much data you are creating, how can you secure it?
This creates a major challenge from a compliance, storage and backup perspective.
Regulations
GDPR has created several new challenges for IT (you can read about the implications it has had on backup and disaster recovery here). Accidental deletion of data is considered data loss and could incur fines, as could a breach or a disaster. If you have the right backup solution in place these fines can be avoided and many of these challenges can be overcome.
One new challenge in this space is the right to be forgotten and how this affects the way we manage our backup and disaster recovery systems. Many organisations have extensive offsite archives of physical backups going back many years that would need to be checked for data relating to the individual requesting to be deleted which can be highly time-consuming and inconvenient for an IT department.
Cost
Every gigabyte of data incurs a cost and as your business grows, the amount of data you have will be growing exponentially too. It can be easy for the costs of backing up your data to escalate without you even realising. Backup strategies are not one size fits all, and with a number of pricing tiers and add-on services available, you will need to base your strategy on your organisation’s own unique set of needs and requirements when it comes to backing up your data.
To learn more about our pricing model, visit our Pricing page – https://www.backup-systems.co.uk/pricing
